Board report October - December 2010

Since the last report the Harmony community have published two new
milestones, 5.0 Milestone 15 and 6.0 Milestone 3, and are currently in
code freeze in preparation for new milestones of both branches. These
milestones are bug fixes to existing functionality as there is no
significant new functionality being worked on in the project at the
moment.
The ongoing issues around Apache Harmony's TCK license have had a
negative impact on the project's development progress, since it is
deemed most unlikely now that the project will be able to achieve our
original goal. The majority of developers were working on Harmony code
with a view to achieving a fully compliant and compatible implementation
of the Java specifications. Some developers have asked to be removed
from the project, and some have gone inactive.
Although we have received support from the Foundation for making a
release of the current code, the Harmony PMC and discussion on the dev
list has focused on the potential for adoption of such a runtime release;
summarized best in the quote from Harmony's dev list "[releasing a
non-compliant runtime] misses the important point that no matter how
safe we, the ASF, think we are there is no point making releases that no
one (with more to lose?) would risk using." This is reinforced by the
Oracle vs. Google case which serves as a notable indication of the
potential risk to other consumers.
While other diverse points of view certainly exist, it would appear at
present that nobody is stepping forward to develop and release a
non-certified implementation of the specifications. Until somebody
comes forward with a specific proposal to take the code in a new
direction no options will be ruled out.
On a more positive note, a number of new developers have posted to the
dev list and a community member posted details of his success running
Apache Hadoop on Apache Harmony!
We believe that Apache Harmony has implemented all the requirements of
the Foundation branding guidelines.